Comrades, are we approaching a constitutional crisis, and did Thomas Jefferson and James Madison give us the means to deal with it?

First, the crisis. It is clear that there are those in public office who favor modest to total disarmament of US citizens under the guise of protecting us and making us safer. Cooperation by military and law enforcement personnel in implementing a gun ban is unlikely, so perhaps firearms confiscation would be carried out by armed and unaccountable federal agencies which have already been buying and stockpiling ammunition, sometimes in huge quantities (liberals tell us when we have "too much" ammo, have any of them thought of telling that to the Social Security Administration?). Wyoming is entertaining nullification of any new gun bans, and at the same time leading by example as a state government resisting federal encroachment.

There is precedent for this with the Virginia Resolutions drafted by James Madison and the Kentucky Resolutions drafted by Thomas Jefferson. No less than the author of much of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights along with the author of the Declaration of Independence argue that states do have the right to nullify federal laws as a check on federal power. After all, the 10th Amendment is irrelevant without a means to enforce it.

The background of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions is the direct assault on liberty and the First Amendment by the Federalist Party. The Federalists empowered themselves to deport legal aliens in the Alien Act and criminalized free speech in the Sedition Act (and provided a convenient expiration date so it couldn't be used against Federalists after the next election cycle). Read the documents for yourself here.

In principle, Jefferson argues from the First Kentucky Resolution...

That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes — delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force:

And by way of warning, Jefferson argues in his usual elevated style that the danger of a too powerful federal government is that...

...the general government may place any act they think proper on the list of crimes and punish it themselves whether enumerated or not enumerated by the constitution as cognizable by them: that they may transfer its cognizance to the President, or any other person, who may himself be the accuser, counsel, judge and jury, whose suspicions may be the evidence, his order the sentence, his officer the executioner, and his breast the sole record of the transaction: that a very numerous and valuable description of the inhabitants of these States being, by this precedent, reduced, as outlaws, to the absolute dominion of one man, and the barrier of the Constitution thus swept away from us all...

In the Virginia Resolution, Madison warned an unchecked federal government would eventually...

...consolidate the states by degrees, into one sovereignty, the obvious tendency and inevitable consequence of which would be, to transform the present republican system of the United States, into an absolute, or at best a mixed monarchy.

In the Second Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson proposed the remedy to overreaches of federal power saying...

That the several states who formed that instrument*, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties**, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy:

*the Constitution

**the states

So in dealing with the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th Century, Jefferson and Madison argued that...

1. The federal government ought to be limited.

2. The federal government tends to exceed its constitutional limits.

3. The best check on excessive federal power is nullification of federal laws by state legislatures.

In our day, we are witnessing the culmination of nearly 150 years of expanding federal power which threatens what's left of our diminishing liberties. Federal agencies have within themselves the self assumed authority to make policies, to determine that citizens are in violation of those policies, and to execute penalties upon citizens for non-compliance. In short, they assume the roles of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of governments without separation of power, and without accountability.

Let's encourage our state legislators to likewise nullify federal law that no longer protects our liberties but openly violates them - especially as we're dealing with the right to self defense. Federal power ought to be regarded with healthy suspicion, and the states are our last line of defense. Or, as Jefferson put it...

...free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions...

Comrade Blogunov, have you not heard that the old rich white rich slaveholders (did I mention rich) you quote (formerly known as "Founding Fathers") are no longer relevant in the world of Tuesday™ ? Their world thousands of years ago is nothing like today. There is nothing to be learned from archaic relics of history.... The problem with challenging an illegal act of guvmint is that they usually have you in a gulag and your accounts frozen while you try to do it.

Having finished Mecham's bio of T. Jefferson I would point out that there is a flip side.

Seems he & his republican anarchist were chomping at the bit to crush New England's attempts at negotiating a separate surrender to His Majesty during the 2nd War of Independence (lots of east Maine folk pledged allegiance to his Majesty during the war but I can't source that) . The Hartford Convention may not have specifically referenced secession but the momentum was there. How they jumped from that to waging a Christian Jihad against the South 45 years later can represent either hypocrisy or 'pragmatism'.

The centrifugal vs centripetal....a natural law always in motion but that is most times hidden during times of complacency. We do not live in an era of complacency.

Vermont is a contemporary example. The Ben & Jerries have always been full of themselves but the intensity of their secessionist rhetoric is a function of who is in the White House. Some village(s) seceded during the Reign of BushHitler. Other(s) would have arrested the persons of President and Vice President and shipped them off to the Hague for a war crimes trial.

Jackson is another 'republican' (founder of the Democratic Party) that made his allegiance to the tribe called the Majority (mob) ascendant to the local minority a basis for his intimidation of the 'nullies' circa 1830 dispute over tariffs.

How this show turns out is for future generations to see. Meanwhile Wyoming and others point the way

"...the Civil War "vindicated the principle that the Constitution establishes a permanent union between the States.""

or in other words....By Right of Conquest

I don't necessarily object to the concept, if we rolled back all such conquests we'd all be living in east central Africa.

But the Civics implication here is that it is compulsion which binds the Union. Informed people have always known this but it is never 'taught' that way to the children. It is never spoken of in such terms.

Good point, Bear. If the state controls education, how can education become anything other than the propaganda arm of the state?

And Expel, I never got on the petition to secede bandwagon. I mean, one might as well ask Lincoln for permission to leave the Union. This comes up from time to time on both sides of the political spectrum. Do you remember the unfulfilled threats and promises by liberals to leave the country, commit suicide, or secede if GWB ever got reelected? Their plan was to create the United States of Canada and derisively call the rest of us "Jesusland".

I hope that if we take local government more seriously, we could over the long haul improve the federal government. If it's too late for that, and it may be, then I'm very open to secession.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand

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